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dsinc writes "Neil Armstrong, first man on the Moon, has died. NBC News broke the news, without giving other details. Neil was recovering from a heart-bypass surgery he had had a couple of weeks ago. Sad news, marking the end of a glorious and more optimistic era... RIP, Neil."Also at Reuters.

I was literally less than 24 hours old when Apollo 11 launched. I spent my childhood years dreaming of an upcoming adult life where being an astronaut would be as common as being a plumber, or an accountant. I eagerly read The High Frontier [wikipedia.org], eagerly anticipating orbital space stations and living in one.

I watched the Challenger explosion as a teenager, and soon after watched Congress, then subsequent administrations, all of them - they went and fucked up the whole space idea beyond all recognition. I eventually gave up those dreams with heavy resignation as a young adult.

Throughout it all? Armstrong, Aldrin, and many others among them kept the dream alive. Because of them, we now have Zubrin, Musk, Bigelow, and a whole cadre of people working like hell to make the original dream into reality. I'll likely be dead of old age before that original childhood dream becomes reality, but with a little hope and a lot of work, it may yet get there.

Armstrong was one of the pioneers. Certainly, you could say he lucked out, yadda yadda... but I disagree. His coolness under pressure made Apollo 11's mission possible (and successful) when nearly any other astronaut would have aborted too early or gotten everyone killed.

By far and away, at least to me, the greatest accomplishment that Neil Armstrong ever made for the manned spaceflight program of America was not the landing on the Moon, but rather his survival after flying the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle [wikipedia.org], designed to test astronauts on a real flying vehicle that was supposed to behave like the Lunar Lander would do on the Moon.

It was also the closest that any astronaut got to dying but somehow survived, and it was amazing the Mr. Armstrong didn't die on the day his vehicle crashed and forced him into using the seat ejection mechanism.

Anybody who flew in that vehicle was simply nuts, but it did provide the engineers working for Grumman enough information to be able to safely get those folks to the Moon and back. I also don't think anybody else in the NASA astronaut corps could have been successful at landing the Eagle in the Sea of Traquility during the month of July, 1969.

Interesting read though I'd consider Gemini 8 spinning out of control to have been pretty close to killing astronauts, couple of years earlier too. Of course it was Neil who saved that mission as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_8#Emergency [wikipedia.org]

"I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer -- born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow." - Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong has truly been an inspiration to each and every one of us. What we wouldn't have done to be in his shoes when he made that One Small Step.

Not a damn thing, personally. I'd have wrecked that lander the second I touched the yoke, assuming I hadn't literally shit my life into my pants on liftoff. Some jobs require specific men, and I'd no more want to have stood in his shoes than I'd want to stare down the defense line in an NFL game or suddenly realize I'm in the water halfway across the English Channel.

Have you ever seen an actual Apollo spacecraft? Live and up close? They're amazingly rickety and primitive looking; I'd be afraid to take one out on the highway, never mind all the way to the moon.

When I saw the Apollo 16 (in Huntsville AL), I thought of that scene in star wars where they rescue the princess from the death star and she sees the millennium falcon and says "You came here in that? You're braver than I thought!".

I thought of that scene in star wars where they rescue the princess from the death star and she sees the millennium falcon and says "You came here in that? You're braver than I thought!".

I didn't take it as a real insult to the Millennium Falcon (always capitalized), just that Princess Leia was a little bit bitchy.

What amazes me about that scene is how Han manages to keep his shit together and not throw her Hotness to Vader on the way out. Think about everything he had to deal with up to that point:

- Effective death sentence from Jabba the Hut for losing a shipment- Stuck on a backwater planet just trying to get a drink and figure out what the fuck he is going to do next- Jedi, of all people, booking passage trying to get away from Imperials... and Imperials just love Jedi at this point.- Gay golden robot annoying as hell second guessing his decisions every other second- Sarcastic midget robot that just beeps all the time- Greedo, getting all up in his shit when he is trying to get the money to appease Jabba- It's implied... but you know Chewbacca probably shed like a mother fucker on that ship, lord help Han, when Chewy drops some super-fiber induced dump in the bathroom. Not a great idea to be burning matches in enclosed spaces with combustible gases on a star ship- Smart ass little blonde kid that has only seen that backwater planet, but already knows everything at 18.- The Death Star- Seriously, the fucking Death Star. What the fuck is that? A Star Destroyer was not big enough for the emperor, he needed a god damn movable planetoid full of storm troopers? Those same guys Han was just shooting at not moments before. You know the old saying... the Millennium Falcon may do the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs, but galactic communications are near instantaneous......- Tractor beam pulling him to the aforementioned planetoid of fuck my life.- Jail break goes horribly wrong. Han can't act for shit over the radio. Screws the pooch big time.- Her bitchiness. Kind of hot, Han knows she has a rough day, but seriously not even a little gratitude?- Stuck in a garbage compactor- What the fuck is that smell?- No.. No... What the fuck is in her with us- Garbage compactor is... well... compacting- Need Gay Golden Boy's help. Out of everyone Han knows, it's fucking Threepio that needs to nut up and come to the rescue- Sure.... I don't mind fighting a whole bunch of troops. You guys go ahead, me and Chewy are going to fuck their shit up

- Bitch insults my ride just as we are about to get away.

Yeah. I think Han was the very model of self restraint to still let her on the ship. I would of told Chewy to get the fuck on the ship and gone back to the bar alone.

What we wouldn't have done to be in his shoes when he made that One Small Step.

It'd be painful, but I'd force my size 13 feet into his size 10 boots if I could.

But no, I wouldn't want to be first. That honor I gladly give to the daredevils like Neil Armstrong. He will be remembered, and it's well deserved.

At least he did not get to "celebrate" December 13 this year, when it will be 40 years since the last man on the moon.

As for the first man... Well, it's one of my earliest childhood memories. My father had bought us a TV for the occasion. In a wooden cabinet with a lockable sliding door. The screen was far smaller than most monitors today, but we thought it was huge. As was the realization that humans walked on the moon! While it might not have been the direct reason for my becoming an engineer, it certainly influenced it. I learned how to use a slide rule before I could ride a bike because of Armstrong, Aldrin, Gagarin and all the other great pioneers.

And as I raise a glass to Yuri once a year, I will raise one to you too. You live in our dreams. One day man will go to space again and explore strange new worlds. One day. Thanks for proving it possible.

Armstrong has already been there so it would probably be more fitting to send him to Titan or Phobos, a moon that man has never stepped upon.

Give the man credit, he did one of the great firsts in history yet was always humble and quick to give credit to everyone else that helped to make it happen, a true class act that many could learn from. RIP good sir.

Navy pilot - combat veteran, test/research pilot, aerospace engineer, university professor. Of course he was most famous for being an astronaut, commander of the Apollo 11 mission and the first to walk on the moon.

He inspired generations of scientists and engineers. Because of Armstrong and his fellow astronauts my friends and I in elementary school knew math and science were important and were highly motivated to pay attention. We had real heroes are role models.

He was known for his patience and concentration in difficult situations. In early Earth orbit tests, his capsule was spinning out of control off-axis due to a faulty stabilizer nozzle. He used the spares to straighten the ship even though it was difficult to tell which end was "up".

He later had to bail out of a LEM lander during a test run in the desert just barely in time to open the chute as the lander crashed. He came to work the next day cool and calm as if it was any other work day, yet determined to find out what went wrong.

And then during the Apollo 11 landing, he took control from the auto-pilot because the lander was headed for some large boulders. Fuel was running out because back then they didn't know the moon's center of gravity was offset from its physical center. The margin was tiny, but he found a way.

It's even better than that. NASA in the sixties and seventies showed us just how powerful a robust process is.

A process is fragile if it attempts to solve a crisis by planning ahead for all contingencies. Inevitably an incident will happen that was not planned for, and the whole edifice will fail.

A robust process assumes something unforeseen will go wrong, and concentrate on making sure that there are adequate resources to respond in an ad-hoc manner.

NASA's processes in the Apollo project relied on a robust response: when anything went wrong, a highly qualified person was on the spot to think of a response and execute it. Sure they planned for incidents, but the final contingency plan was to have smart people with high stress tolerance to provide incident response 'on the ground'.

Armstrong was one of the exemplary examples of those people. He was by no means the only one though.

A process is fragile if it attempts to solve a crisis by planning ahead for all contingencies.

The problem with your robust/fragile thesis is that NASA's primary methodology was the one you call fragile.

A robust process assumes something unforeseen will go wrong, and concentrate on making sure that there are adequate resources to respond in an ad-hoc manner. NASA's processes in the Apollo project relied on a robust response: when anything went wrong, a highly qualified person was on the spot to think of a response and execute it.

Which is precisely what NASA didn't do. They spent months creating a set of mission rules that spelled out what to do in the case of a wide variety of casualties and circumstances. They then fine tuned those rules in the process of training controllers and astronauts to respond reflexively when they encountered a change of circumstances, a casualty or problem, or any other deviation from the current flight plan. (I say current because each mission had a whole raft of plans... for an earth orbit mission in case they couldn't execute TLI, for a lunar orbit mission in the even of a LM problem, etc...)

Sure they planned for incidents, but the final contingency plan was to have smart people with high stress tolerance to provide incident response 'on the ground'.

You're correct - that was the final contingency plan. Executed only if no other option existed. That is why their process was so robust - because there were layers to the plan.

I think it was Armstrong's ability to "stay calm" in times of crisis in the two instances you mentioned was the reason why he was chosen as mission commander on Apollo 11. During his days as X-15 test pilot, some test pilots at Edwards AFB thought he didn't have enough "stick and rudder" skills to handle sophisticated test vehicles, but Armstrong proved them all wrong....

Actually, many pilots, esp. commercial and military, are engineers. And as to the early astronauts being scientist, that was not as much. Most of them had several degrees, but it was normally related (engineering and math, or engineering and physics).

I was 6. My grandmother was watching with me. She told me that when she was my age, they hadn't yet flown the first aircraft. I think she was born in 1892. I extrapolated from this that by the time I grew up, there would be colonies on the moon, and I'd be living the life of George Jetson. I'm disappointed. But if it hadn't been for the Apollo program, I might not have become an engineer.

I was 10, the day they landed I was so absorbed with the TV I sat on a plate of spaghetti and meat balls. It's hard to describe how important the TV was to people that day, the only other event I can think of that has come close to gluing that many people that strongly to a TV is 911. Every boy at my school wanted to be an astronaut in the same way we all wanted to be Superman, I think one Aussie eventually made a trip on the shuttle, still no sign of Superman. I do think it inspired millions of kids but it also set expectation too high and by the end of the 70's kids my age had worked out they were not going to be an astronaut and many of them lost interest, rather than being glued to their TV on the last moon shot they were calling the entire Apollo project a waste of money, nothing more than cold war saber rattling.

Big science is bigger than ever these days, and with the internet it's cheaper and faster. It just does things more quietly, more of of background hum than a climatic touchdown. A Higgs bosun here, an MRI machine there, an internet everywhere. Some amazing space pics, some dire warnings, and all but forgotten smallpox. I agree we could do with a lot more of it, but it's how we use it that counts.

I will say that he was a class act until recently. Over the course of the last couple of years, he allowed his politics to take hold. For example, he blasted SpaceX and stated that they would not be capable of launching humans, but spoke of private enterprise being required to take hold in space. Likewise, he blasted Obama for backing SpaceX, while ignoring the fact that the plan started in the mid-90s under NASA, killed by republicans, and then was restarted by Griffin and pushed by W.

Up until he put his loyalty to his political party, he WAS a class act. One that cared for America. Just in the last couple of years, did he seem to lose that. But I do not think that should taint what he accomplished.

In this case, science fiction can be a leading indicator. Even as the moon landings happened, post-apocolypse science fiction was well established. Of course even some of that managed to be the optimistic, "we will recover, we will do better," type. I'd say one signpost of the optimism really dying, though perhaps not the key event, was the corporate-ruled dystopia genre. Government stupidity and butchery was only a contributing factor, not the key one.

Blame the politicians if you wish - they're not blameless. But they don't carry the real weight. We do - the people who elect. There are also the wealthy and corporations - the power-brokers who make sure that "the right people" are put in front of us, when we vote.

In an open public letter also signed by Apollo veterans Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan, he [=Armstrong] noted, "For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature".

On November 18, 2010, at age eighty, Armstrong said in a speech during the Science & Technology Summit in The Hague, Netherlands, that he would offer his services as commander on a mission to Mars if he were asked.

Sigh. Not to minimize Armstrong's achievements — which took courage, brains, and skill — but he himself would probably wince at your hype. One of the greatest men in the 20th century? He led a historic space mission. That's a big deal, but it's not in the same class as wiping out smallpox, discovering relativity, defeating Nazi Germany, holding a nation together with a third of its workers unemployed, laying the foundations of the computer revolution...

I think that his great humility and quiet nature was what made him the perfect choice to do why he did. He was not the leader although he did command the moon landing mission. he was one who recognized and acknowledged the efforts of all who enabled him to do what he did.

I agree that he would probably have considered it hype as well, but I disagree that he wasn't in the same class. He inspired a generation of kids to become engineers, pilots, and astronauts. He rallied the entire globe around a peaceful cause. He was a leader. And he was the face of NASA, and the proud face of what America was capable of. And in 1969, in the middle of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, amidst huge problems around the country with race riots in Watts and Minneapolis and Chicago and Baltimore, here was this Great American Hero that we could all agree had made a remarkable achievement. We needed Neil Armstrong to be who he was.

When the football has a bad spin or tumbles it does not correct the spin/rotation itself. Armstrong did so with a Gemini capsule that was in danger of going out of control. Similarly he had to land Apollo 11 manually when the computers were hazarding the ship. He was a pilot, not a passenger.

He was NOT cargo. He was NOT some monkey who got aimed and shot at the moon.

That generation of astronauts(and kosmonauts) had to be able to do complicated math and astonishing engineering feats while spinning out of control and slowly asphyxiating.

To put it bluntly and to use a car analogy:
Those guys were the ones who had to devise and install a new braking mechanism in a car that goes 500mph straight to a curve that leads to a nasty drop. Resourcefulness, knowledge, physical fitness, level-headedness and pocket protectors.

Of all the great who participated in the moon program, they were -had to be- what Nietzsche wrote about. Prime underwear on the outside, cape over the shoulder and a giant S painted on the chest material. With pocket protectors. The people in the tin-can WERE Plan B. And C. And D.

I'm too young to remember his accomplishments firsthand, but because of his accomplishments with the help of the entire infrastructure of the space race, I was able to grow up with the dream of living in a future in which I could visit the moon and mars... Now I feel that dream has died right along with him.

Mr. Armstrong, I watched you jumping about on the moon when I was nine years old. It was unbelievably cool! The future seemed to be one of boundless possibility.

Now I'm older, and more cynical, and the world hasn't really turned into the place I thought it would be at this point - but whenever I think about your trip to the moon I'm suddenly a wide-eyed nine-year-old that still believes anything can happen. It gives me hope that mankind really will solve it's most vexing problems, once it finally decides to do so.

Thank you for everything, sir. I hope your eternity is a pleasant one.

Everyone knows the real Neil Armstrong never left the moon, who do you think started building the first military moon base, and was later put in charge of it? In fact the entire Apollo program was designed to deliver astronauts to the moon, and then fake an Earth landing and use body double to replace them. Did you see how big the rocket needed to get all that crap to the moon was? And how small the lunar module was, no way did it have the power to escape to orbit and enough fuel to return to Earth. The Moon landings were real but the Earth landings are a HOAX!

If we do become a space faring people to future generations he will likely be the best remembered American. Name anyone that accomplished anything greater in the last 200+ years? There is only one person in all of human history that will be remembered as the first person to step foot on another world. Even to this day it's likely the greatest accomplishment of us as a species let alone as a nation.

"A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands, where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins." from A Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

Name anyone that accomplished anything greater in the last 200+ years?

Jonas Salk, who eliminated polio. Louis Pasteur, who discovered germs. John Snow who proved that cholera spread via contaminated water and thus strengthened the case for public sanitation immeasurably... And just missing your 200 year deadline, Edward Jenner who introduced and championed vaccination.

In just one field of human endeavor (medical science), these are people who caused change.

As important as the moon landing is historically, Neil Armstrong was just a cog - the guy standing in the right place at the right time to be picked to pilot the mission.

Hundreds and thousands of years from now, people who made the first moon landing possible will live on through the name of Mr. Armstrong, who will continue to appear in the history books.
Thank you, Mr. Armstrong.

I was fortunate to get a first hand viewing on TV of all the Apollo missions while bouncing on the knee of my father. The Apollo 11 astronauts were my first heroes and not long after I could read I enjoyed every book, magazine and encyclopedia article I found about them and their mission.

Armstrong is the model on how to be a hero; do something exemplary and treat it as just another day at the office. Embrace knowledge, challenge your mind and enjoy your job. And when it's over, it is over. Armstrong shied away from the public spotlight and certainly passed on what would have been many lucrative opportunities to cash-in on his fame. Instead, he remained pretty much the same person after the mission as before.

While I do understand that the US is in financial difficulty, it strikes me as important that the first man to walk on the Moon---on another celestial sphere---should be given a significant send off.

Frankly, I think the funeral should be at least on par with that expected for a _sitting_ president, and probably beyond. It may well end up being the most important funeral, or the most important man, in the history of the United States, if not the world.

Neil Armstrong deserves a state procession---an international procession. America and the World owe both he and his generation that much at least.

While I do understand that the US is in financial difficulty, it strikes me as important that the first man to walk on the Moon---on another celestial sphere---should be given a significant send off.

Frankly, I think the funeral should be at least on par with that expected for a _sitting_ president, and probably beyond. It may well end up being the most important funeral, or the most important man, in the history of the United States, if not the world.

Neil Armstrong deserves a state procession---an international procession. America and the World owe both he and his generation that much at least.

He deserves exactly what every other person deserves when they pass away.** Their last wishes granted.

It's nice and all that we sit back and "demand" these glorious sendoffs, but in all honestly, I'd much rather respect a man of honor and whatever wishes he had for his end.

(** = I was going to use the words "leave this world" in reference to his celestial passing, but he's kind of BTDT already.;-)

For very obvious reasons it cannot be staged. The biggest one being the Soviets.

The whole thing was a HUGE publicity stunt and a big dick waving contest between the US and the USSR. Considering how easy it was for the USSR to get spies to some key positions in the US, I don't doubt that they had a pretty good view on the whole moon program, too. A chance to expose that program, a program that the whole nation dedicated considerable resources to and that was watched by people all over the globe, as staged would have been an absolutely priceless PR victory for the USSR. If they only had had a HINT of a chance that this could have been debunked, they certainly would have jumped on that opportunity. Everyone all around the globe had their eyes on that event. You really think they would have let the opportunity slide to expose the US as fakes?

It seems to me that trying to stage it and keep it hushed up would have required more resources than simply doing it.

I don't want to steer this discussion away from the topic, but this is exactly why no theist will ever be able to convince me about the "truths" of his religion. How am I supposed to believe that those word-of-mouth stories that are thousands of years old could be true when people believe in such ludicrous things as "the moon hoax", despite the fact that it was a much more recent event and there are tons of material evidence to support the fact that there was *no* super-competent con man who supposedly managed to trick thousands of engineers into thinking that they are not building a fake rocket and that they are not receiving fake telemetry not from the Moon? People *want* to believe in the irrational, they find something irrational everywhere they look. Human capacity for self-deception never ceases to amaze me.

Yeah, and they gave birth to some of the worst brats ever - Us. (I'm a late boomer, so I'm part of that generation, but I try to do better.)

Study the Bible a bit, and you'll see that the Hebrew nation survived every adversity thrown against it, except one. Prosperity - got them every time. Seems to me that has something to do with our current situation.

Technically most of the astronauts and people involved with NASA/Apollo missions were NOT boomers.

Neil was born in '30, while the Boomer generation was from '46-'64.Moon landing was in '69, so the Boomers would have been at most 23 yrs old at the time, so they would have just been finishing college and entering the workforce.

The Boomers were responsible though for the eventual budget cuts to NASA and education, but still reaped the benefits of it's hay day.

Not really, because the major budget cuts did not happen till after Nam; when the Boomers started getting elected into Congress and the older generation retiring/dying off.

And besides, do we need further moon missions? We've been there lot's of times, we know what's there and have a crap ton of stuff on it's surface and in it's orbit. Until it becomes more feasible to put a permanent presence there it'll be a waste to keep sending people to hang out for a few days and collect rocks.

I call BS on the idea that we have the tech/means for a moon base right now.

Cursorily is only like the 2nd non-terrestrial craft to use something other then solar for power. And a moon base would need a fuck ton more power then Curiosity could produce. (almost half it's total weight is devoted to the power system)

Plus you have to take into account Oxygen, Water, Food. We can recycle some, but it's far from enough to be self sufficient. They would still need regular supply runs from Earth, like the ISS.

How about cosmic radiation? The moon is after all outside the van allen belt. And even with shielding, the previous missions were timed to keep radiation exposure to a minimum.

The most ideal plans at current call for a moon base in 2014, with a four man team, rotating out due to the previous issues I noted and regular supply runs. (Near the pole so it'll get near constant sunlight for solar power)

We absolutely have the means to do it. We lack the will. Its expensive as hell and the world runs on cost-effciency. A moon base is the first step in the ultimate insurance policy and people dont want to pay up.

You must be young. There are books from the 70s and 80s that address everything you're complaining about with viable solutions. Cosmic rays are a problem? Fine, live in buried habitats. That's been a feature of every moon base design I've ever read, except for The Millenial Project, which recommended a water shield instead (and included proposals for where to get the millions of kilograms of water necessary to shield an entire crater). Those designs even included ways of piping in filtered sunlight, so the residents wouldn't suffer from depression induced by light-deprivation.

Need power? Fine, land a nuclear fission reactor. Doesn't matter much which specific technology. We have it, and it doesn't even have to be engineered to survive operating in hard vacuum, because it can be buried too, in a pressurized chamber. You'd most likely use one of the designs used in naval submarines or aircraft carriers, since they're already designed to travel well.

Oxygen is easy. Even without any system whatsoever for regenerating oxygen from carbon dioxide, we know how to fly big tanks of compressed oxygen. And all the serious proposals included such regeneration systems, many of them incorporating plants.

Which leads to the next thing. Food. NASA has already done studies of what species of wheat would best grow in lunar conditions using minimally improved lunar material as soil. There's an entire corpus of material on the subject of how we might develop food self-sufficiency at a lunar base, and it's fairly obvious that it's possible. It's just a matter of GOING and doing the in situ research necessary to prove which ideas actually work. Until then, the solution of putting food on rockets and launching it is technology we have, and understand very very well. SpaceX just did precisely that, delivering to the International Space Station. It's so easy, it can be done on a budget.

Water is even easier. The human metabolism actually produces excess water as a byproduct, and treating water is something that's exceedingly well understood. It's not even remotely rocket science. It's science-based, but it doesn't take a scientist to run a wastewater treatment plant. It barely even takes a person, anymore. The ones in common use across the world are largely automated. Most of them don't even have very many moving parts. You'd be amazed what holding ponds in sunlight can do. Meanwhile, getting a system going with sufficient free water to start with is just as easy as solving food. You put a booster under it and you launch it. We know how to do this. Most serious proposals for putting massive amounts of water into space call for freezing it first, since it behaves better under launch conditions as a solid. Yes, people have actually considered that.

In short, we do in fact have ALL of the technology required to establish a long-term habitable lunar base. Becoming self-sufficient is then only a matter of additional research, which can only be done at an inhabited base. And we already know what research must be done. It's just a question of actually performing the experiments.

And doing it at all is solely a question of money, which is solely a question of will. There's more than enough free-floating capital doing absolutely nothing on Earth except generating commodity bubbles. The people who own it don't have the imagination to spend it.

Other people went to the moon after Armstrong, not many, but several. It was really halted because it was/is so dangerous, expensive, and there weren't any yields from the moon that we can't get from orbit, which is vastly safer.

I do share this sentiment.
Per aspera ad astra.
If mankind ever will need an epitaph, this will be it.
It was a monumental effort carried out by many. And it was the embodyment what it means to be human. Ambition. For the heck of it. Cooperation. For our betterment. Because it is there. Somebody has to and it bloody well better be us. Maybe it IS made of cheese?

Ambition and curiosity got humans were we are now for better or worse. It is the very fibre of our being. It is said that if we want to survive we

I really used to like that movie. Ed Harris as Neil Armstrong. Perfect casting. One thing I really got out of that movie was how NASA originally wanted to have the astronauts as ballast, giving them little or no ability to pilot the craft. Neil Armstrong was one of the astronauts who protested, and forced NASA to outfit the capsules with pilot controls. If you look at the Gemini capsules, they actually do resemble airplane cockpits if looked at from the right perspective [photobucket.com].